The British library lending division and British official publications

Gouernment Publications Review, Vol. 3, pp. 217-283 (1976). Pergamon Press Printed in U.S.A.

THE BRITISH LIBRARY LENDING DIVISION AND BRITISH OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS

DAVID G. JOHNSON

British Library Lending Division

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the functions of the British Library Lend- ing Division as applied to Official British Publications. Specific areas presented are acquisition policies, coverage and holdings of UK government publications, bibliographic control, and organization. The volume and type of lending requests received by the BLLD for government documents is analyzed.

The British Library comprises three divisions: the Lending Division, the Bibliographic Services Division and the Reference Division. The Lending Division (BLLD) alms to support the library system of the country by offering a speedy loan and photocopy service. To this end, it has a very large stock, which is supplemented when necessary by the resources of other libraries. Its services are available to all registered institutional borrowers, which apply for publications by means of pre-paid requisition forms. The total number of requests received in the year 1975-76 was nearly 2,500,000, over ten percent of them from foreign libraries.

The BLLD came into being in 1973 when the National Central Library moved its staff and stock northwards from London to Boston Spa in Yorkshire to merge with the National Lending Library for Science and Technology (NLLST). Prior to this marriage both institutions had performed similar lending services but in different subject areas; the NCL in the Social Sciences and Humanities and the NLLST in Science and Technology. A further difference was that the latter’s service was mainly concerned with supplying serial publications from stock, whereas the former dealt mainly with monographs and operated chiefly as a switching centre between libraries by means of union catalogues, although it also had a substantial stock.

GENERAL ACQUISITION POLICY

In order to satisfy the majority of demands from stock, the BLLD endeavours to acquire as comprehensively as possible those categories of material in heavy demand, as well as some others not commonly or easily available from elsewhere. All ‘worthwhile’ serials are acquired, irrespective of language or subject, and all ‘worthwhile’ English language monographs. Further

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categories of material acquired are report literature, conference proceedings from all countries, British and American doctoral theses and music scores. Non-English language monographs are purchased mainly in response to demand. ‘Worthwhile’ is defined empirically as the material users are known or likely to request on interlibrary loan. Fiction, children’s literature and ‘low level’ material fall outside the boundaries of this definition.

A class of material not yet mentioned is official publications. These were covered by both the NCL and the NLLST, since official publications cover a wide range of subjects and forms. The NCL maintained its official publications as a separate collection, and also had a separate catalogue of official publications whether held by the NCL itself or notified as held by other libraries. The NLLST treated official publications straightforwardly as either monographs or serials. The Official Publications Section of the BLLD is based mainly upon the NCL catalogue and collection.

OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS ACQUISITION POLICY

Official publications are thus dealt with as a special category, posing as they do special problems of acquisition, cataloguing, and bibliographic control. The criterion covering their acquisition is, however, the same as that covering other material, that is, all ‘worthwhile’ material. For convenience, the BLLD takes, by means of the selective subscription service and standing orders, all material published by HMSO even though some of this, such as leaflets and posters, might be considered ephemeral in nature.

Most HMSO publications are of great importance, including as they do all the papers of Parliament as well as non-parliamentary material under departmental headings - statistics, census material, annual reports of various government bodies, technical reports and so forth. Publications issued directly by government departments are acquired in response to demand, if they satisfy the definition of ‘worthwhile’ and if it seems likely that they are still in print.

The publications of nationalised industries, research associations, para-government bodies (such as the British Library itself) can also be defined as ‘official’. And indeed the BLLD has large holdings of these publications although they are not handled by the Official Publications Section which being based on the NCL collection and catalogue, excluded them from its area of responsibility (see below). They are treated straightforwardly as either monographs or serials.

The Official Publications Section collects all OECD, UNESCO and EEC material. The publications of inter-governmental bodies such as ILO, FAO, WHO etc are acquired in response to demand. So also are US Government publications, many of which are however already collected as

report literature in various microform series. The BLLD also subscribes to the Congressional Information Service, receiving all the publications of US Congress on microfiche and the Americal Statistics Index, which covers US statistical material,

Foreign official publications other than serials are purchased in response to demand if they fall within the limits of acquisition policy and if they can be verified bibliographically. It should be stated, however, that demand for foreign material is very low and most is acquired by means of gifts and exchanges. The responsibility for collecting serials - apart from those supplied by HMSO on standing orders - rests with a separate Serial Acquisitions Section; here again the criterion of ‘worthwhile’ is the guiding principle. A valuable tool published by the BL Reference Division is the British Library Checklist of British Official serial publications’ which gives such useful information as periodicity and publisher.

Coverage and Holdings of UK Government Publications

As would be expected, the collection is strongest in British official publications, of which

The British Library Lending Division and British Official Publications 279

the core consists of the output of HMSO. Since 1962 all HMSO current publications have been

purchased by means of the selective subscription service, with standing orders for the periodical

publications. The selective subscription service operates as follows: for an annual subscription HMSO guarantees to supply a copy of all its publications in any subject field specified by the

purchasing library. The BLLD subscription covers all publications mentioned in the HMSO Daily List. The only exceptions to this are individual Statutory Instruments and the daily and weekly Hansards, which are received as bound volumes at a later date.

The remainder of the collection’ includes substantial holdings of other earlier material, among which are the following:

1)

2)

3)

4) 5)

6) 7) 8)

9)

An almost complete run of the Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords Journals 1509-1857 and House of Commons Journals 1547-1857 (to- gether with some later volumes). Public General Acts (and their predecessors under other titles) from 1685, as well as the various retrospective volumes of Statutes back to Magna

Carta. Nearly 1,000 volumes of reports and minutes of evidence of Royal Commissions. An almost complete set of the Rolls Series of the Public Records Office. A large number of Command Papers issued in the 19th and 20th cen- turies. A good though not complete collection of census reports. A large number of the memoirs of the Geological Survey; but no maps. The complete l,OOO-volume set of the Irish University Press reprints of 19th century Parliamentary Papers in subject sets. A large miscellaneous collection of pre-1962 British departmental publications and Parliamentary Papers.

Most of the above material, representing some 23,000 items, has been acquired by means of donations from various libraries and organisations. The HMSO post-1962 collection and nonHMS0 publications number about 60,000 items.

PROBLEMS OF IDENTIFYING AND OBTAINING BRITISH GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS

It may be useful to review briefly the structure of British official publications, the bibliographic control exerted over them and the difficulties of identifying and acquiring them. All HMSO publications, both Parliamentary and non-parliamentary, are listed on Daily Lists;

these are cumulated into Monthly Catalogues, which in turn are cumulated into Annual Catalogues. In addition to these major tools there are consolidated quinquennial indexes, as well as monthly and annual lists of Statutory Instruments etc. Other useful tools are the Sectional Lists, a numbered set of catalogues based mainly on the divisions of responsibility between sponsoring departments and containing in-print non-parliamentary publications, with a selection of Parliamentary. HMSO also produces indexes to the Statutes and Government Orders.

As stated above, many British official publications are issued directly by government departments, research associations, para-government bodies etc, not by HMSO; these publications include a wide diversity of materials - report literature, serials, statistical data, circulars, current awareness journals, etc. The responsibility for deciding who should publish lies with the

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government department rather than with HMSO; the latter acting only as the servant to the former, which makes the decision about which publication method to adopt. There are no comprehensive weekly, monthly or annual catalogues covering all non-HMSO material. Few of them are included in the British National Bibliography. Some departments, however, list their major publications in their annual reports, which are published by HMSO; for example, Education and science in 1974, the report of the Department of Education and Science. Other departments issue current awareness journals; thus the Department of Health and Social Security publishes Current Literature on the Health Services and Current Literature on the Personal Social Services, both monthly. One of the best organised bibliographically of the government departments is the Department of the Environment, issuing an annual list of publications and a monthly abstracting journal, DOE Library Bulletin. The Building Research Station, which comes under the DOE, issues Building Science Abstracts; while the DOE’s

Property Services Agency produces Current Information in the Construction Industry, with its annual cumulation Construction References, as well as the annual PSA Publications. Never- theless, with such a variety of treatment by different departments the overall bibliographic picture is not a happy one.

Many interlibrary loan requests are for non-HMSO official publications. It should be noted that the BLLD, unlike the BL Reference Division, does not receive a mandatory copy of every British publication on legal deposit. Therefore while all HMSO publications can be supplied

from stock for loan immediately on publication, this is not the case with many non-HMSO imprints. The poor bibliographical control over the latter makes identification and selection very difficult - indeed, the Reference Division itself finds it very hard to ensure that it is receiving everything. Interlibrary loan requests often serve the purpose of bringing a publications’s existence to the attention of the BLLD. Many such requests are from readers who have come across notices in specialised journals and abstracts. If the requisition form cites the source of reference, BLLD staff can check this to verify details and the publication is ordered directly from the department concerned. Unfortunately not all requests give their sources of reference, and in such cases the bibliographic checking must be undertaken at BLLD. Moreover, requests may be received when items are no longer obtainable, and at best supply is delayed if items are not in stock at the time of requesting. It is however questionable whether, even if it were possible, comprehensive acquisition by BLLD of all official publications should be attempted, since the total number published is huge in relation to the demand.

There is another method of acquiring material: by means of gifts and exchanges. The BLLD Gift and Exchange Section (formed from the British National Book Centre and the NLLST’s equivalent operation) coordinates the donation of library materials to the BLLD and the distribution to other libraries in the UK and elsewhere of items not required by the British Library. In this way various gaps in the collection can be filled, and many items are added to stock which are out of print and not otherwise available. The number of official publications taken averages about one thousand a year. Sometimes very large donations are accepted: the Belgian Parliamentary Library recently made a gift of 11,000 kilos of bound House of Commons Reports and Papers.

ARRANGEMENT OF OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS AT BLLD

The separate Official Publications section of the Union Catalogue of Books (UCB) was created in 1962 and covered the holdings not only of NCL but of other libraries also. The basis of inclusion in the Official Publications catalogue is the listing of the issuing department or organisation in the relevant government manual; in the case of British official publications this


was the British Imperial Calendar, known now as the Civil Service Year Book3. The catalogue, with 120,000 British entries, does not however contain card entries for all official publications in the library’s collection. In the first place much of the collection is deliberately not catalogued, as explained below. Secondly, the general strategy of search in UCB determines

what entry is filed where; official publications which are conferences, pre-1801 publications or musical works, or which have a personal author, are entered in the appropriate section of UCB or Conference Index, with such references in the Official Publications catalogue as are made necessary by the absence of up-to-date bibliographies. The Official Publications catalogue

therefore contains entries which can be found most readily under the corporate country and

departmental heading. British official publications are dealt with in two different ways:

1) HMSO publications with pre-1962 imprints, and all non-HMSO publications, are all either catalogued or marked off on printed lists. Command Papers are arranged in order on the shelf by their own numbers, but other

parliamentary papers are given location numbers, the collection being too small and sporadic to organise into official bound sets. Similarly, non- Parliamentary papers have been given their own individual location numbers, thus forming one numerical sequence prefixed CPA. For convenience, other sequences such as censuses, Parliamentary Debates, Acts, Rolls Series, Royal Commissions etc. are given their own sequences.

2) The second method involves HMSO publications with a post-1961 im- print. These are received daily. They are checked against the Daily Lists, stamped and shelved immediately, and in this way are available for loan on the same day as arrival. No cataloguing is done, and clerical and professional procedures are cut down to a minimum to expedite avail-

ability. Parliamentary publications (House of Commons sessional papers, House of Commons bills and House of Lords papers and bills) are shelved according to sessional data and then in numerical order in their respective categories. Command Papers, Public General Acts, and Parliamentary Debates are shelved in their own special sequences.

Non-Parliamentary publications which appear in the Daily Lists under their departmental headings are arranged firstly by date, then by department and finally alphabetically by title. Each department is given an abbreviation; for example all items published by HMSO for the Department of the Environment in 1972 can be located at the shelfmark GP 72/ENV.

The HMSO printed catalogues perform the function fo an index to the collection. One disadvantage with this system is that if a requesting library does not cite the date of publication, the task of scanning the printed catalogues can be very arduous. This is however offset by the advantages gained by avoiding cataloguing, typing, filing etc and by increasing the speed of availability.

OTHER RESOURCES AT BLLD

As with other categories of material, where it is impossible to supply an official publication from BLLD stock other resources are called into play. The Official Publications catalogue can

often provide locations of libraries holding the requested item, and these locations are notified to the inquiring library. The BLLD can also forward requisition forms directly to various

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Libraries which act as ‘back-ups’; these are large or special libraries which lend exclusively or mainly at BLLD’s request. They include the copyright libraries with their vast resources - Cambridge and Oxford Universities, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales and Trinity College Dublin. The British Library of Political and Economic Science (the library of the

London School of Economics) also acts as a back-up, accepting a limited number of forms each week for items which have either been found in UCB marked with the location LSE or which have been traced in the London Union Catalogue of the Social Sciences. Last but by no means least the BL Reference Division Official Publications Library cooperates in two ways; firstly by checking and verifying the bibliographic details of requests for official publications (mostly foreign), forwarded because the relevant tools are not held by the BLLD; and secondly by providing if possible, photocopies of the requested publications. Other more specialised libraries cooperate as back-ups, but most of them have relatively little to offer in the way of official publications.

In addition the BLLD possesses the catalogues of various libraries or groups of libraries, which can sometimes supplement the Official Publications catalogue and the back-up libraries.

VOLUME AND TYPE OF REQUESTS RECEIVED

In 1975-76 BLLD received 2.47 million loan and photocopy requests - 14.2% more than in the previous year. Requests for British official publications increased at a similar rate if not slightly faster. Of all the requests dealt with by the Official Publications Section, by far the largest number stem from academic libraries (universities, polytechnics, colleges of education

etc); the next largest group is that of special libraries (commercial, technical, government); and the smallest number is from public libraries. The publications requested span a wide range of dates, from the eighteenth century to the current week, but most requests are for publications produced during the last lo-15 years. All subjects are covered; some examples taken from a typical day’s batch are as follows:

1) 2)

3)

4) 5)

6) 7)

Royal Commission on tithe rent charge in England and Wales 193.5-36. H M Poor Law Commissioners. First annual report of the Poor Law Commissioners of England and Wales 1835. Department of the Environment. National Parks policy review committee 1974. Redundancy payments act 1965. Geological Survey. Special report on the mineral resources of Great Britain. Lead and zinc ores in the pre-carboniferous period. Department of Energy. Statistics of energy 1975. Rotuli litterarum patentium in Turri Londinensi asservati 1201-1216, ed. by T. D. Hardy. 1835.

Requests received by the Official Publications Section number about 130 per day, or about 30,000 per annum, of which 20,000 are for British official publications. Of these 20,000, 65% are supplied from stock, 12% are redirected to other departments within the Library, 13% are supplied with locations from the union catalogue and 10% are given speculative locations or sent to back-up libraries.


FUTURE POSSIBILITIES

It should be stressed that since the raison d’etre of the BLLD is to lend, all items in stock are for loan. Consequently the BLLD has items which are available for loan from no other

source. Examples of such items are those listed in Sectional List No 24, British National Archives4, of which the BLLD aims to have a complete collection. Attempts are always being made to plug gaps in such collections by taking advantage of the various reprints, or in some cases microforms, which are becoming increasingly available. Recently the parliamentary publications of Northern Ireland 1921-72, and Government publications relating to African countries prior to independence, have been added to stock. Furthermore the microfilm reprint of HMSO publications 1920-62 is in the process of being acquired.

A further possibility for the future might be the increased reliance on the BL Reference Division to supply photocopies of works requested. The BLRD does not at present lend any material, and in particular cannot lend British material, for which it has an archival responsibility. It does however already supply photocopies of serials which the BLLD does not hold, and this service is being extended to the stock of the Official Publications Library, which houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British official publications in the world. A back-up service of this kind - which would of course have to operate within the copyright laws - would greatly extend the BLLD’s ability to satisfy requests.

REFERENCES

’ British Library. Official Publications Library. Checklist of British official serial publications. 7th ed. London, British Library, 1975. ISBN 0 7141 0375 6.

2 British Government publications at the NCL. NCL Occasional Newsletter, no. 10, April 1970, p. 4.

3CivilService YearBook 1975.London,HMSO, 1975. ISBN 0 11 630 215 1.

4Sectional List 24: British National Archives. London, HMSO, 1975.

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The British library lending division and British official publications